“I think it would be too bad to lose such a historic place here,” McDermott said.

Located at 4061 Adams Ave., the 300-seat Ken is the last single-screen commercial movie house in the city. One other in the county, La Paloma in Encinitas, is still in operation.

All other such theaters have been either bulldozed or rehabilitated for other uses. The Fox is Symphony Hall. The Loma is a Bookstar bookstore. Fabrics are sold at the Adams in Normal Heights, T-shirts at the Strand in Ocean Beach. However, many museums operate single-screen theaters, from the Imax at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center to Sherwood Auditorium at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla.

“If nothing replaces or moves in to keep the Ken going, San Diego loses something valuable,” said Deborah Klotchko, executive director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, which includes a 126-seat theater. “We live in a time where everyone is recording video or making photos. We’re a lens-based culture. Everyone can take those kinds of images, but it’s things like the Ken Cinema that really show us the fine art, the documentary, the real power of cinema.”

IBISWorld, a business analysis firm, says in its 2014 movie theater report that operators nationwide are trying many different approaches to growing audiences and revenues through more concession sales and surcharges for 3-D blockbusters.

“Ultimately, however, IBISWorld anticipates competition from online video access to largely offset these positive trends,” the report says, projecting attendance growth at only 2 percent this year and sales at an annualized growth of 1.4 percent over the next five years, going from $14.9 billion this year to $16 billion by 2019.

Long-time Ken goers remember a film tribute to John Lennon after he was murdered in 1980, a sing-a-long with the “Sound of Music” and a string of foreign language films not screened anywhere else locally.

In 1984 Guy Hanford convinced his parents to stock rental videotapes at their gift shop next to the theater and the inventory at Kensington Video now runs to 65,000 titles. Hanford got the movie bug after working for Bob Berkun, who ran the theater when it first opened ion 1947 and bought the building in 1966.

“He was a terrific guy and he loved movies,” Hanford said of Berkun. “Bob was a frontiersman, breaking ground.”

Hanford’s job was to change the marquee every Thursday and he remembers “the drunks” coming out of the Ken Club just east of the gift shop and rattling the ladder to see if he’d fall off. He never did and never dropped any of the red plastic letters and numbers.

He said Ken Video gets new customers from the theater and vice versa.

“There’s a symbiotic relationship between us and also between the theater and the restaurants,” he added. “Adams Avenue is becoming a new restaurant row.”

The Kensington neighborhood is all abuzz about the Ken, said Maggie McCann, who helped put on the community’s 100th anniversary in 2010.